What’s the ROI of partnerships and ecosystems? Well, Microsoft's market cap jumped to $2.6Tr on their rollout of AI to enterprise customers and partners. This $100B+ boost is 📈10X what they initially invested in their partnership with OpenAI. But let’s take a closer look—why such optimism?
🤖 Copilot Ecosystem
Among other things, MSFT unveiled their new “Copilot ecosystem”. This might sound like marketing jargon, but it may be much more.
It all began with GitHub Copilot, followed by Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Dynamics CRM 365 Copilot. Now, they're inviting everyone to join the party, transforming this 'Copilot' concept into a platform anyone can build upon.
Check out this 2-min clip with Satya Nadella, CEO, and Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer, explaining why it’s a big deal.
The Copilot ecosystem starts with an infrastructure layer (MSFT cloud, AI foundation models, user data management), which leads to an AI orchestration layer.
On top is an application level where you’ll see Microsoft Co-Pilots, but they also want partners and customers to be building their own copilots on their platform too.
🏬 Packaged as the “Copilot ecosystem”, this approach sounds a lot like an AppStore concept.
The only company that is more valuable than Microsoft today is Apple (at $3Tr+), which excelled in refining and scaling exactly these AppStore and ecosystem concepts.
Microsoft is not only making this the year of their cloud marketplace (more on this in future posts), but they’re also taking this concept even further in the B2B space.
If they manage to scale this ecosystem, all while driving Azure cloud consumption in the meantime, Microsoft may soon overtake Apple.
🤝 But to unlock what they call the “AI advantage”, Microsoft needs partners to fully participate
The early indicators are promising:
“Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service is the fastest-growing service in Azure history”, boasting 9.5K customers. Additionally, 📍 9K+ partners already transact on Azure AI, with a quarter utilizing the Azure OpenAI service.
To catalyze this further, Microsoft launched a new 📍 AI Cloud Partner Program, as “moving forward, the capabilities of AI and the Cloud will be integrated and inseparable”.
This new program focuses partners to drive value across the entire customer lifecycle, emphasizing "onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling".
🎁 Finally, Microsoft unveiled enterprise-grade ChatGPT4, now securely available via Bing Chat Enterprise for 160 million people. Along with announcing a $30 user/mo pricing on Microsoft 365 Copilot, this move promises to democratize AI access in B2B.
With Microsoft's building the Copilot Ecosystem together with partners, it's clear that they're setting the pace. It’s interesting to watch how this new ecosystem emerges and if it will be challenged.
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